The Department of Education is giving morning-after pills and other birth-control drugs to students at 13 high schools, The Post has learned.

School nurse offices stocked with the contraceptives can dispense "Plan B" emergency contraception and other oral or injectable birth control to girls without telling their parents - unless parents opt out after getting a school informational letter about the new program.

CATCH - Connecting Adolescents To Comprehensive Health - is part of a citywide attack against the epidemic of teen pregnancy, which spurs many girls - most of them poor - to drop out of school.

While Big Apple high schools have long supplied free condoms to sexually active teens, this is the first time city schools have dispensed hormonal birth control and Plan B, which can prevent pregnancy if taken up to 72 hours after unprotected sex.

It might be a nationwide first as well. The National Association of School Nurses could cite no other school district supplying Plan B.

So far, during an unpublicized pilot program in five city schools last year, 567 students received Plan B tablets and 580 students received Reclipsen birth-control pills, the city Department of Health told The Post.

This fall, students can also get Depo-Provera, a birth-control drug injected once every three months, officials said.

Oral and injectable contraceptives require prescriptions, which, in the CATCH program, are written by Health Department doctors.

A man who posed as a pilot and joined cabin crew in a plane cockpit has been arrested, Italian police said today.

The unemployed 32-year-old man, whose real identity was not released, created a fake profile for himself on Facebook and called himself Andrea Sirlo, even posting pictures of himself wearing a uniform and Aviator sunglasses.

To complete the illusion he made up fake identity cards and even sent himself imaginary comments from dozens of fake cabin crew friends who expressed their 'delight' at being rostered with him on flights.

Police held the man in the bar at Turin's Caselle airport and revealed details of the elaborate scam at a press conference - as they compared it to the hit Leonardo Di Caprio film Catch Me If You Can in which he posed as a fake pilot and con man who flew more than one million miles around the world in the 1960s.

Officers said they believed he had flown in the cockpit of at least one flight between Munich and Turin in October last year and a link on his Facebook page highlighted the trip on a low budget airline called Air Dolomiti but did not take command of the plane.

Pittsburgh - Eighty-four billion pieces of junk mail were delivered to our doors last year - music to the ears of the U.S. Postal Service.

"We certainly have to fill in the void when it comes to revenue," says the agency's Tad Kelley

There's been a huge recession-related decline in the volume of first class mail. The postal service hasn't relied directly on taxpayer dollars since the early 80′s.

Cutting costs only goes so far in easing serious budget deficits, so the USPS is looking to junk mail as a rescue remedy to add more revenues.

Bangkok - Police officers of Dindang police station arrested Mrs. Wonnt Lalita, age 50, nationality Cambodian, for claiming that she was representing Jesus, and opening an unlicensed medical clinic of massage therapy to cure general illnesses.

The self-proclaimed divine healer was arrested after a 22-year-old diabetic female patient died in her clinic on June 19. The patient was identified as "Ms. Mo"(alias).

Ms. Mo had just graduated with first-class honors from the Faculty of Education, department of Early Childhood Education and majoring in Elementary Education. She was supposed to have attended her graduation ceremony in July.

After the patient died, her father filed a complaint with Mrs. Chanthana Jindathawornkit, the director of the law office of the Department of Health Service Support in the Ministry of Public Health.

The patient's father, Mr. Paiboon (surname withheld), age 51, said that his daughter came to have therapy at Mrs. Wonnt's clinic for her diabetes. The one-room clinic was named Lalita Wongt Co. Ltd, and was in a 1-story business building, located on No. 22, Soi Choomchuen, Asoke, Dindang Road, Dindang, Dindang.

The outlaw doctor claimed she could cure people with her body massaging, and told his daughter to stop taking her diabetes pills. But stopping the pills caused her death, according to the health director Mrs. Chanthana, who co-operated with police officers to arrest the doctor.

After $30,000 for controversial conversion therapy, three attempts at exorcism and one failed marriage, Peterson Toscano finally resolved the conflict between his faith and sexuality - he was gay.

It took 17 years to accept it.

Whether called straight to gay, conversion or reparative therapy, the practice Mr Toscano put himself through purports to help individuals change their sexual orientation.

There are those who claim the practice, largely supported by fundamentalist Christian churches, to have changed them from homosexual to heterosexual. They are know as "ex-gay".

But as far as Mr Toscano - who calls himself an "ex-gay survivor" - is concerned, not only does it not work, the process is "psychologically damaging".

Mr Toscano, now 47, grew up in an average Italian American Catholic home in Upstate New York. But as a devout Christian, and member of the Evangelical Church, he found it difficult to resolve what he saw as a conflict between his sexual orientation and his faith.

"I was doing something spiritually and morally wrong that I would be punished for in the afterlife. And so there was a lot of fear and terrible desperation," he told BBC Religion.

As a teenager in early 1980s America, Mr Toscano experienced a time when the word "gay" was synonymous with Aids. Up to 1973, US psychiatrists had been classifying homosexuals as insane.

"I put two and two together and made what I thought was a logical equation at the time of saying 'that's wrong, that's bad, I need to fix it'. And then 17 years later I finally woke up and came to my senses," he said.

His years of treatment are painful for him to recall. After an interview with US National Public Radio that triggered a period of depression, he now avoids recalling the specifics.

However, he recounts one of the darkest incidents in some of his performance work. During a two-year residential stay at Love in Action, now called Restoration Path, in Memphis, Tennessee, Mr Toscano was required to record all the homosexual encounters he ever had.

He was then told to choose the most embarrassing to read out to his family.

The Mansa High Court has sentenced nine men to a total of 315 years imprisonment for killing and burning seven people accused of witchcraft.

And a juvenile, who is the sixth accused in the matter, has been placed on a two-year probation under the care of the social welfare department.

Ndola High Court judge Petronella Ngulube, sitting in Mansa, passed the sentence on Chipushi Kapempe, Joseph Chama, Mwewa Mwange, Rabbison Cholwe, Charles Chulu, Chola Mwape, Francis Kwesele, Derrick Ngosa and Mwape Supriano.

All the accused were jointly charged with seven counts of murder, contrary to Section 200 of the Laws of Zambia.

Particulars of the offence are that on November 21, 2012 in Samfya, the accused jointly and while acting together murdered Impson Malunga, Laban Sombo, Lutoto Chamina, Jennifer Mwewa, Alick Bufumi, Green Mecha and Enear Lumpa.

The State called 16 prosecution witnesses, who all testified that the accused persons were seen in the village looking for and taking away all the people who were killed.

The court heard from a witness, Alick Chanda, that on the material day, while he was at home with his parents Lumpa and Bufumi (both dead), he saw a group of young men who took his father away.

"They told me that the chief wanted to see my father and that they would bring him back but the following day, I was approached by police to give a statement over the death of my parents," he said.

Amsterdam - Riot police broke up crowds of youths who turned violent in a tiny Dutch town late on Friday after several thousand people descended on the community after a schoolgirl's Facebook invitation to her sixteenth birthday party went viral.

Media reports said six people were hurt, including three seriously, after disturbances broke out in the quiet northern Dutch town of Haren. Reports said shops were vandalized and looted, a car set on fire and street signs and lampposts damaged before police broke up the crowds.

Up to 600 riot police were on the scene during the disturbances, according to one media report. There were at least 20 arrests, media said.

Pictures from the scene showed party-goers wearing T-shirts with "Project X" written on them -- apparently a reference to the movie Project X, in which three high school seniors throw a party that gets out of control as word spreads.

Some 30,000 people received the invitation from a girl announcing her birthday party on Facebook, according to media reports. The party was intended to be a small-scale celebration, but the girl did not set her Facebook event to private and the invitation went viral.

A tree trimmer was apparently crushed to death by heavy palm fronds that fell on him while he worked, authorities told The Los Angeles Times.

Emergency personnel responding to a call on Saturday about a trapped tree trimmer in Hollywood found the body of an unidentified man buried in palm fronds about 30 feet above the ground, according to the Times.

"Palm fronds like this have been known to weigh as much as half a ton," Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Brian Humphrey told the newspaper. "In these scenarios, the tree trimmer can be crushed, asphyxiated or have their neck broken."

Humphrey added that the cause of death has not yet been determined.

Prison staff from scandal-hit security firm G4S took the fingerprints and mugshots of children as young as two who visited inmates at a new jail.

The practice was stopped only after a string of complaints to jail bosses at HMP Oakwood, a privately run prison in Staffordshire that holds 1,605 offenders.

The Mail on Sunday has discovered that over-zealous staff forced children who were visiting family members to pose for pictures and have electronic fingerprints taken, which were then stored on a computer at the prison.

The man who jumped out of the Bronx Zoo's monorail into the tiger exhibit was charged with trespass Saturday, according to law enforcement officials.